THE STOCKYARDS
It is rather widely known, I think, that Chicago built the first
steel-frame skyscraper--the Tacoma Building--but I do not believe that
the world knows that Kohlsaat's in Chicago was the first quick-lunch
place of its kind, or that the first "free lunch" in the country was
established, many years since, in the basement saloon at the corner of
State and Madison Streets. Considering the skyscrapers and quick lunches
and free lunches that there are to-day, it is hard to realize that there
ever was a first one anywhere. But the origin of things which have
become national institutions, as these things have, seems to me to be
worth recording here. It may be added that the loyal Chicagoan who told
of these things seemed to be prouder of the "free lunch" and the quick
lunch than of the skyscraper.
Of two things I mentioned to him he was not proud at all. One was the
famous pair of First Ward aldermen who have attained a national fame
under their nick-names, "Hinky Dink" and "Bathhouse John." The other was
the stockyards.
"Why is it," he asked in a bored and irritated tone, "that every one who
comes out here has to go to the stockyards?"
"Are you aware," I returned, "that half the bank clearings of Chicago
are traceable to the stockyards?"
He answered with a noncommittal grunt.
His was not the attitude of the Detroit man who wants you to know that
Detroit does something more than make automobiles, or of the Grand
Rapids man who says: "We make lots of things here besides furniture." He
was really ashamed of the stockyards, as a man may, perhaps, be ashamed
of the fact that his father made his money in some business with a smell
to it. And because he felt so deeply on the subject, I had the half idea
of not touching on the stockyards in this chapter.
However the news that my companion and myself were there to "do" Chicago
was printed in the papers, and presently the stockyards began to call us
up. It didn't even ask if we were coming. It just asked _when_. And as I
hesitated, it settled the whole matter then and there by saying it would
call for us in its motor car, at once.
I may say at the outset that, to quote the phrase of Mr. Freer of
Detroit, the stockyards "has no esthetic value." It is a place of mud,
and railroad tracks, and cattle cars, and cattle pens, and overhead
runways, and great ugly brick buildings, and men on ponies, and raucous
grunts, and squeals, and smells--a place which causes the heart to sink
with a sickening heaviness.
Our first call was at the Welfare Building, where we were shown some of
the things which are being done to benefit employees of the packing
houses. It was noon-time. The enormous lunch room was well occupied. A
girl was playing ragtime at a piano on a platform. The room was clean
and airy. The women wore aprons and white caps. A good lunch cost six
cents. There were iron lockers in the locker room--lockers such as one
sees in an athletic club. There were marble shower baths for the men and
for the women. There were two manicures who did nothing but see to the
hands of the women working in the plant. There were notices of classes
in housekeeping, cooking, washing, house furnishing, the preparation of
food for the sick--signs printed in English, Russian, Slovak, Polish,
Bohemian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Croatian,
Italian, and Greek. Obviously, the company was doing things to help
these people. Obviously it was proud of what it was doing. Obviously I
should have rejoiced, saying to myself: "See how these poor, ignorant
foreigners who come over here to our beautiful and somewhat free country
are being elevated!" But all I could think of was: "What a horrible
place the stockyards is! How I loathe it here!"
On the North Side of Chicago there is an old and exclusive club, dating
from before the days of motor cars, which is known as the Saddle and
Cycle Club. The lunch club for the various packing-house officials, at
the stockyards, has a name bearing perhaps some satirical relation to
that of the other club. It is called the Saddle and Sirloin Club, and in
that club I ate a piece of sirloin the memory of which will always
remain with me as something sacred.
After lunching and visiting the offices of a packing company where, we
were told, an average daily business of $1,300,000 is done--and the
place looks it--we visited the Stockyards Inn, which is really an
astonishing establishment. The astonishing quality about it is that it
is a thing of beauty which has grown up in a place as far removed from
beauty as any that I ever looked upon outside a mining camp. A charming,
low, half-timbered building, the Inn is like something at
Stratford-on-Avon; and by some strange freak of chance the man who runs
it has a taste for the antique in furniture and chinaware. Inside it is
almost like a fine old country house--pleasant cretonnes, grate fires,
old Chippendale chairs, mahogany tables, grandfather's clocks, pewter,
and luster ware. All this for cattlemen who bring their flocks and herds
into the yards! The only thing to spoil it is the all-pervasive smell of
animals.
From there we went to the place of death.
Through a small door the fated pigs enter the final pen fifteen or
twenty at a time. They are nervous, perhaps because of the smell coming
from within, perhaps because of the sounds. A man in the pen loops a
chain around the hind foot of each successive pig, and then slips the
iron ring at the other end of the chain over a hook at the outer margin
of a revolving drum, perhaps ten feet in diameter. As the drum revolves
the hook rises, slowly, drawing the pig backward by the leg, and
finally lifting it bodily, head downward. When the hook reaches the top
of its orbit it transfers the animal to a trolley, upon which it slides
in due course to the waiting butcher, who dispatches it with a knife
thrust in the neck, and turns to receive the next pig.
The manners of the pigs on their way to execution held me with a horrid
fascination. Pigs look so much alike that we assume them to be minus
individuality. That is not so. The French Revolution--of which the
stockyards reminded Dr. George Brandes, the literary critic, who
recently visited this country--scarcely could have brought out in its
victims a wider range of characteristics than these pigs show. I have
often noticed, of course, that some people are like pigs, but I had
never before suspected that all pigs are so very much like people. Some
of them come in yelling with fright. Others are silent. They shift about
nervously, and sniff, as though scenting death. "It's the steam they
smell," said a man in overalls beside me. Well, perhaps it is. But I
could smell death there, and I still think the pigs can smell it, too.
Some of the pigs lean against each other for companionship in their
distress. Others merely wait with bowed heads, giving a curious effect
of porcine resignation. When they feel the tug of the chain, and are
dragged backward, some of them set up a new and frightful squealing;
others go in silence, and with a sort of dignity, like martyrs dying for
a cause.
As I stood there, studying the temperament of pigs, I saw the butcher
looking up at me as he wiped his long, thin blade. He was a rawboned
Slav with a pale face, high cheek bones, and large brown eyes, holding
within their somber depths an expression of thoughtful, dreamy
abstraction. I have never seen such eyes. Without prejudice or pity they
seemed to look alike on man and pig. Being upon the platform above him,
right side up, and free to go when I should please, I felt safe for the
moment. But suppose I were not so--suppose I were to come along to him,
hanging by one leg from the trolley--what would he do then? Would he
stop to ask why they had sent another sort of animal, I wondered? Or
would he do his work impartially?
I should not wish to take the chance.
The progress of the pig is swift--if the transition from pig to pork may
be termed "progress." The carcass travels presently through boiling
water, and emerges pink and clean. And as it goes along upon its
trolley, it passes one man after another, each with an active knife,
until, thirty minutes later, when it has undergone the government
inspection, it is headless and in halves--mere meat, which looks as
though it never could have been alive.
From the slaughter-house we passed through the smoke-house, where ham
and bacon were smoking over hardwood fires in rows of ovens big as
blocks of houses. Then through the pickling room with its enormous
hogs-heads, giving the appearance of a monkish wine cellar. Then
through the curing room with its countless piles of dry salt pork,
neatly arranged like giant bricks.
The enthusiastic gentleman who escorted us kept pointing out the
beauties of the way this work was done: the cleanliness, the system by
which the rooms are washed with steam, the gigantic scale of all the
operations. I heard, I noticed, I agreed. But all the time my mind was
full of thoughts of dying pigs. Indeed, I had forgotten for the moment
that other animals are also killed to feed carnivorous man. However, I
was reminded of that, presently, when we came upon another building,
consecrated to the conversion of life into veal and beef.
The steers meet death in little pens. It descends upon them unexpectedly
from above, dealt out by a man with a sledge, who cracks them between
the horns with a sound like that of a woodman's ax upon a tree. The
creatures quiver and quickly crumple.
It is swift. In half a minute the false bottom of the pen turns up and
rolls them out upon the floor, inert as bags of meal. Only after death
do these cattle find their way to an elevated trolley line, like that
used for the pigs. And, as with the pigs, they move along speedily;
shortly they are to be seen in the beef cooler, where they hang in
tremendous rows, forming strange vistas--a forest of dead meat.
The scene where calves were being killed according to the Jewish law,
for kosher meat, presented the most sanguinary spectacle with which my
eyes have ever burned. Two rabbis, old bearded men, performed the rites
with long, slim, shiny blades. Literally they waded in a lake of gore.
Even the walls were covered with it. Looking down upon them from above,
we saw them silhouetted on a sheet of pigment utterly beyond
comparison--for, without exaggeration, fire would look pale and cold
beside the shrieking crimson of that blood--glistening, wet, and warm in
the electric light.
I shall not attempt to conceal the fact that I was glad to leave the
stockyards.
* * * * *
When, a short time later, the motor car was bearing us smoothly down the
sunlit boulevard, the Advertising Gentleman who had conducted us through
all the carnage put an abrupt question to me.
"Do you want to be original?" he demanded.
"I suppose all writers hope to be," I answered.
"Well," he replied, tapping me emphatically upon the knee, "I'll tell
you how to do it. When you write about the Yards, don't mention the
killing. Everybody's done that. There's nothing more to say. What you
want to do is to dwell on the other side. That's the way to be
original."
"The other side?" I murmured feebly.
"Sure!" he cried. "Look at this." As he spoke, he produced from a pocket
some proofs of pen-and-ink drawings--pictures of sweet-faced girls,
encased in spotless aprons, wearing upon their heads alluring caps, and
upon their lips the smiles of angels, while, with their dainty
rose-tipped fingers, they packed the luscious by-products of
cattle-killing into tins--tins which shone as only the pen of the
"commercial artist" can make tins shine.
"There's your story!" he exclaimed. "The poetic side of packing! Don't
write about the slaughter-houses. Dwell on daintiness--pretty girls in
white caps--everything shining and clean! Don't you see that's the way
to make your story original?"
Of course I saw it at once. Original? Why, original is no name for it! I
could never have conceived such originality! It isn't in me! I should no
more have thought of writing only of pretty girls and pretty cans, after
witnessing those bloody scenes, than of describing the battle at Liege
in terms of polish used on soldiers' buttons.
But original as the idea is, you perceive I have not used it. I could
not bear to. He thought of it first. It belonged to him. If I used it,
the originality would not be mine, but his. So I have deliberately
written the story in my own hackneyed way.